Less Than Perfect

Last week my oldest daughter started bringing home her 1st grade homework. Her Kindergarten teacher wasn’t big on homework, so this is a new routine.

She was pretty excited to start this process. The first day she hardly took a breath between getting out of the car and ripping open her backpack to pull out her assignment.

I wonder where that overachiever attitude comes from? Hmmmm…I’ll think about that and get back to you after I’ve worked out a matrix and graphed the possibilities of her genetic inheritances from her parents.

At the end of the week, she completed an assignment and left it on the table. I hadn’t taken the time to read through it with her first, and I noticed some mistakes. I called her over and pointed this out in a gentle way so she could fix it, as endorsed by her teacher who doesn’t want to be sending home all kinds of red-inked papers to 6 year olds.

But this is where the trouble began. She was not happy that I highlighted these imperfections. She wouldn’t even listen to my reasons as to why I wanted her to look at her work again. She just kept telling me “No, you’re wrong! This is how she told us to do it!!” in between all her tears and whining.

I should have read through it with her before she started to try and prevent this situation. But I also recognized that she has to learn that it’s okay to admit mistakes and try to correct them.

So I gave up and we left it as is. I told her we’d let her teacher look at it and find out the answers later.

Today was the day. The red ink day.

Her work came home and sure enough, the two answers were marked wrong. It still had a lovely stamp on it and said “Good Job!” but all my daughter saw were the two red corrections and the “-2”.

The tears started and were soon followed by some hyperventilating and the insistence that she was still correct.

I had to pull her aside and calm her down before I could even talk to her. When she was ready to listen, I explained that it was okay to make mistakes. I told her that’s how we do some of our best learning. And that she still gets a lot of credit for all the hard work and all the other answers. And so on.

She then tells me she doesn’t want to make mistakes and that it’s not fair since I don’t make any mistakes.

Oh how I love the fantastical and innocent thinking of a six year old.

So then I start explaining the concept of grades to her. I tell her about all the different levels involved, and I write out all the letters, including pluses and minuses, so she can see that even with some wrong answers, she can still do great work.

And I tell her that I got good grades, but they weren’t all A+’s like she thinks they were. Then I even tell her that I’ll show her my grades. She looks quite pleased when she realizes that she gets a glimpse into the pre-mommy mommy.

The other day I ran across my transcript from graduate school. I had put it in a safe place so when I decide to go back to work I’ll have it handy for the job application process. I take her with me and we pull out my transcript from the file. I point out the B’s that are listed among the A’s.

I tell her that I’m very proud of my work and that I was happy to get those grades, even the almost-but-not-so-perfect B’s. Then she wants to see an F, but thankfully I didn’t get any of those.

This all sinks in and she agrees that it’s okay to make some mistakes, as long as we try to learn from them.

So this afternoon we sat down and read through her homework together. This time I made sure she understood it before she completed it. And it all went much smoother.

My daughter’s inability to accept being wrong, or less than perfect, was my red ink.

And thankfully I’m still learning from my mistakes too.